汉语原型转喻及其英译方法——以“我坐了木船”的英译为例

On Chinese Prototypical Metonymies and Methods of Their Translation into English——A Case Study of the English Translation of "Wo zuo le muchuan"

转喻和翻译研究的成果发表很多,问题也不少。本文尝试从原型转喻理论视角,用定量方法,考查汉语散文中的转喻及其英译方法。研究发现,基于西方语言的转喻理论,只能部分适用于汉语语篇研究,同时转喻研究还存在一些理论问题需要深入探讨;另外,转喻有很高的语境和文化依赖性,直接翻译程度很低,大多数只能意译或省略。

Researches on metonymy and its translation have witnessed many publications as well as quite a few problems. A- dopting the perspective of the theory of prototypical metonymy and resorting to a quantitative approach, this paper makes an attempt to examine metonymies in Chinese prose texts and the methods of their translation into English. It is found that theories of metonymy based on western languages can only be partly applied to the investigation of Chinese texts ; that some theoretical problems concerned with researches on metonymy want deep inquiry; and that metonymy, highly dependent on context and culture, can merely be translated with a low possibility and most metonymies have to be either translated in terms of meaning or omitted.